


june is kind and november hangs guilty

by JadeLupine



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Canon, Canon verse, Fluff, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, Kissing, Love, M/M, Romance, Sex, Snapshots, relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-12
Updated: 2015-04-12
Packaged: 2018-03-22 12:30:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3729013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JadeLupine/pseuds/JadeLupine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>their relationship is fringed by guilt and moments that death itself joins them in their bed. a canonverse character study on the relationship between the commander who carries the weight of the world, and the captain who follows him without a question.<br/><i>It is over quick and fast, Levi doesn’t remember too much except for sweat and the taste of the kisses and how extremely clean he felt when Erwin came inside him with a choking, muffled grunt. And how dirty he felt later, as he lay on the bed like a common whore, as Erwin hastily dressed and combed his hair.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	june is kind and november hangs guilty

**Author's Note:**

> erwins been receiving a lot of hate lately and i wanted to do a character study - ish sort of thing for it. 
> 
> i wanted to write a moments-style fic!
> 
> please continue reading and have a great day ahead!

**no regrets**

When Levi finally begins seeing again after the haze of blood and screams, everything is quiet, very quiet in a still, ugly way except the clopping of his horse. He can barely feel his own body, his back bent and his eyes cast down, perhaps he has died too – joined Isabel and Farlan in the true underworld, but his body is tingling and he wants to vomit. He drags his eyes upward and sees the Commander’s blonde hair and broad back braced against the sunrise so Levi urges his horse to follow, follow, follow until they both drop dead.

**hell**

Levi is the one that changes Erwin’s bandages. He is nauseous and disgusted, eyes fluttering shut at the sticky reddish wounds and the millstone in his stomach. He does not feel like kissing Erwin, not now, when his lips are dry and chapped and there is golden stubble on his cheek – but he wants to touch him. Levi wants to slump against the walls and weep and vomit but he uses linen to sop the fluid from the wound, gags as the shard of bone touches his hand. He wraps it again, in smooth white bandages, and kisses the cheekbone flecked with sweat.

Erwin’s eyes flutter open.

Levi wants to kiss him again, this is the moment he has been waiting for, the reunion, his lover –

The pain hits in a wave and this is the first time he hears Erwin scream and Levi is in hell.

**commander**

Erwin’s brightest of blue eyes are dark spaces in a white face – he looks like a skull.

“I am Commander of the Corps, Levi. Shadis has stepped down.”

“Oh.” Levi nods. “I’ll go muck out the horses.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No. You stay. Commander.”

But Erwin takes Levi’s hand in his (there is nobody around – they number only in the tens now anyway), and tugs gently and goes with him.

**old man**

It is hard, sometimes, to remember that Erwin is only thirty six. But his face is still young and hard, and Levi does not understand why he looks old. He uncurls himself from the rug where he has been cleaning, and looks up at Erwin, frozen in a snapshot of rare slumber, and his hands fascinate Levi. Perfect, slim hands with clean nails – not the hands of a warrior or a soldier, certainly not old hands. It is only his eyes that are old, Levi thinks.

“He’s been old since he was nine.” Mike says to him one day, in a whisper. “That’s when his father was killed.”

Nine, Levi decides, is a terrible age to grow old.

**right hand man**

“Do you want anything else? Information? Food, even? You should be glad we’re friends, you know.” Nile has never seen Erwin look so pathetic in his entire life. Some vindictive pleasure sizzles through him and he presses it down momentously.

“Tell me where Levi is.” Erwin looks up, kneeling, his only arm strung up in shackles. “The Captain of the Corps, Nile, tell me where he is.”

“Oh. Your right hand man.” Nile murmurs. He wishes friendships did not haunt him, he hates the fact that he and Erwin had been friends since childhood, that Erwin would come to eat Marie’s food and play with his two young children. Perhaps for the sake of that, Nile could lie. “He is safe. Now focus on doing what you have to.”

Nile does not know if anyone is safe, most of all himself and his family.

**words**

Erwin is enchanted with the way Levi’s harsh words complement his. Putting quiet spaces between his own effervescent observations.

**gravestone**

There was no grave to mourn at, for Levi’s squad. No funeral. Bodies quickly returned. So Levi mourned in his own ways – quiet harsh scratches on Erwin’s back in the middle of being fucked, biting the broad shoulders hard enough to make blood drip. Waking at nights with tears on his face and screams in his throat, and as winter enshrouded the world, Levi walks too slowly to catch up with it.

“We have no time to mourn.” Erwin says finally.

“You have no time for anything.” Levi snaps.

**broken**

He does not tell anyone – he does not react _at all_ , but seeing Levi so broken makes Erwin sick – but he rationalizes his feelings. Seeing anyone thus would make absolutely anyone sick.

No regrets, he tells himself.

You must have no regrets.

**read**

“Read to me.” Levi commands, looking almost feline as he stretched on the sofa.

“You have broken your ankle, Levi. You haven’t lost your legs, eyes and arms.” Erwin looks up from the papers he was signing. “Read something yourself.”

“Shit, Erwin, I break my leg and you’re signing crap. Go on, once.” Levi looks up through half lidded, dark eyes.

Erwin shook his head and continued writing reports with his smooth cursive.

“Do not go gentle into that good night

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”

Erwin mutters poetry, and Levi smiles.

It is enough.

**wake**

Sometimes Levi stays up, watching wounds heal.

**sex**

It is over quick and fast, Levi doesn’t remember too much except for sweat and the taste of the kisses and how extremely clean he felt when Erwin came inside him with a choking, muffled grunt. And how dirty he felt later, as he lay on the bed like a common whore, as Erwin hastily dressed and combed his hair.

**not now**

“Do you care for _nothing_?” Levi does not pose this as a confrontation; he simply speaks, as it was his way.

Silence.

“I’m not asking because I’m blaming you, you shitty old man. Just asking.”

“Far too much.” Erwin pauses, his back to Levi and his uniform on. “There are days –“

Laughter.

“Days when the tie feels like a chain, and the coat a straitjacket. But I think to myself, Levi, what I told you on that day. I care for things far too much. But not now. Not here. Not me.” He leaves to submit the papers to the messengers from the Capitol.

Then when? Levi thinks quietly, sinking back into the pillows. Then who?

Who will save Captain Smith?

**by heart**

Levi learns his lover by heart, how he wears his suits painfully crisp and his casual clothes so loose its almost laughable. How he loves to unbutton his shirt when he works alone or with Levi.

Erwin learns his lover by heart – how Levi’s hair grows almost abnormally fast, how his voice sounds when he is swearing grittily over dirt in the sink and how he burns toast and slathers butter over it to hide his mistake.

**pain**

Erwin sometimes feels a sudden ache where he was sure his heart could have been – and he wishes he was Levi.

**mike**

“I have been to far too many funerals.” Levi spits through gritted teeth. “And none of them had a complete body.”

“It is not a funeral.” Erwin states simply. “There is no body at all.”

“He was your friend. Before me. Before Hanji. You fucking –“ Levi trails off, and looks at the ground. He thinks of Mike with his ever-present sniffing and his dirty hair and how he was not a die-able age.

**celebration**

When the Titans are dead and the monarch overthrown, they ride back into the Walls one final time. And the people cheer and cheer, for Erwin Smith and his soldiers, and Levi is boiling – he wants to cut them, smother them all in their beds. Erwin is on the leading horse and Eren on the shoulders of his friends, and Levi notices how finally, for the first time, the Commander is crying like how Shadis had done so many years ago, and the people begin to whisper like they once did.

“What the fuck is wrong?” Levi asks sharply, no room for embarrassment, the whole city was watching anyhow.

“Nothing.” Erwin lowers his face. “I am merely proud. Overjoyed.”

Levi knows better, and he is vindictively, viciously glad for the tears on his lovers face because finally he can feel. 

**ordinary**

“Did you have a good day then, Levi?”

“I smacked two shitheads.”

“Sounds enthralling.”

**mine**

“Sina help me, Levi.” Erwin growls, his teeth shining, lupine. “I _will_ have you.”

Levi twists under him, hand on his cock.

Erwin only continues to kiss – but his eyes go a long, long way in.

**numbers**

Twenty two thousand people.

Five Survey Corps members left.

What have I done, Father – was this your theory?

What have I done?

**family**

“What do you want – most in the world.”

“Humanity to succeed. For the Titans to be eradicated and humanity—“

“Cut your fucking bullshit, Smith.”

“Children.”

“You’re as gay as a fucking sea horse.”

“Still.”

**why?**

After sex they are both dewy with effort and arousal, speaking in hushed whispers. 

"Why?" Levi asks, quietly. Erwin does not need to ask what the question meant. He knows Levi like he knows his own body - perhaps better. 

"Because my father died for it." 

"Was he a soldier?" Curiosity knitted itself in Levi's voice. "Killed in battle?" 

"No, no. A teacher." Erwin laughed softly. "My teacher, and that of everyone in school. He taught history. And he knew what the government was up to. So once, when I asked - he told me. He told me, and I - I was nine."

"That's not too young." Levi traces Erwin's collarbone. 

"I told everyone. All my friends, kids on the street, everyone. I was so pompous, big-headed, that  _my_ father knew, and I did. And they killed him." 

"Ah." Levi does not express sympathy. He too had known sorrow, and would not cry for another's. "Typical." 

**away**

This is necessary, this is right, this is safe, his head says, but his hands write more useless plans, and then cross it away slowly, until his fingers are stained over with ink and his candle descends into a molten mess of wax and there is no more light but the moon. 

He misses Levi. 

**drawing**

Levi loves to draw. Not plans and figures, his lines are never straight enough for Erwin’s liking, but people.

“Show me.”

“If you hate it, it means you’re shit at appreciating art.”

The painting is blues and yellows, lights and score and melody and color, and Erwin does not understand how Levi managed to paint his lips so full, how his hair was true gold and his eyes matched an overbright sky before a storm. But it was a nude painting, from the hard muscled chest to the arousal at his groin. And he was smiling. He was smiling in the picture.

“It isn’t me.” Erwin murmurs.

“It is.” Levi insists. “You’re just fucking blind.”

**miss**

And once, at the door, Levi says, "I love you", without meaning to, and wishes he hadn't. Erwin looks too tired and attractive and longing, and he wishes he would take Levi's words like a standard instead of folding them carefully and gently and hiding them away.

Erwin just says, "I know", and he and the wind drift together from the door.

He comes back tomorrow. 

When Levi opens the door and finds him standing there apologetically (eyebrows raised just slightly beneath the pale hair falling into his eyes, hands in his jacket pockets—this, too, is endearing, but it hurts), he wonders for a moment if he wants to be thrilled or worried. Erwin doesn't even ask to be let in; he speaks without crossing the threshold.

"I'm going away for a while."

"Where to?" Levi is ridiculously calm.

"The Capital. There is a plan I am operating with Pixis. It has to be carried out now." 

"...you bastard, you have one fucking arm." Levi spits. "Now you're going to give them the rest of your body to fuck up?" 

"Levi -" 

"Go, then. And don't you dare give me command. Give it to Hange. Or even the fucking tiny blonde kid, Armin. Just don't put your shitty tie on me." 

"I'll think of you." 

(Prison, Levi thinks—who's going to help you there? Who will save you?)

**finite**

They are in the meeting room, discussing more formations for exploration of the suddenly discovered lands. 

Erwin stares at Levi and smiles, and June is kind, but March is cold with memories and November's guilt hangs heavy. 

**Author's Note:**

> hiii hope you really enjoyed reading that i tried not to make it sad but u know its canon so it just is
> 
> erwins backstory and almost everything here is canon too
> 
> you can talk about erwin with me at my tumblr - trashyeruri
> 
> i would love a review or comment about how you felt reading this so please do so! thank youuu!


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